


a city sorrow built

by timtom



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, I tagged m/m because if you squint there's sterek, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Post s03e20 Echo House, Self-Medication, Stilinski Family Feels, no happy ending, there's more than one death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-03 23:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5311022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timtom/pseuds/timtom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>The Sheriff’s gaze was red and raw, and Scott fought the urge to cry, also. There had been too much crying recently, it seemed all that anyone was capable of doing since it happened. His nose would smell only death and salt and it burnt him worse than anything he had ever experienced. Every breath felt like a lung full of embers, and he couldn’t rid himself of it no matter what he did.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	a city sorrow built

**Author's Note:**

> Essentially, this is sort of set in this mythical AU period after Eichen House but before Allison's death, and the pack tries a home remedy to rescue Stiles from the Nogitsune. I haven't included Malia as she doesn't really come into the picture until season four, and because things develop the way they do in this fic, I didn't see a future where Malia would have become involved, anyway. This is super angsty with no happy ending, so be aware of that heading in. It gets pretty relentless. I tagged canonical character death in that they die, but not in the same way.
> 
> For anyone with triggers, I've tried to make mention of them in the end notes, so please take a look if you're sensitive about body and death things. 
> 
> Beta'd by Anna, and title taken from Sorrow by The National

The pack could still smell it.

It had been there, weeks and weeks ago, when they had first been gathered in the room, around the quiet and prone body on the blood-covered floor. It was grotesquely lush with it, like a viscous velvet carpet, and he lay there, in the centre of it all. The iron tang of the smell burnt the inside of their noses like rancid chemicals would when someone made a mistake in Chemistry, or the smell of bleach in a hair salon. It left their nostrils burning like the aftermath of a foreign invasion.

Allison and Kira were the only ones who could even consider the idea of being within touching distance of the body, and even then, their lips were pressed into thin, hard lines. Even though Kira’s Kitsune senses were not as keen as a werewolf’s, Scott still saw the way every strand of Kira’s aura stood on end as she approached the body.

Lydia was absent, as she _can’t watch it happen, I can’t_ , and in that moment, Allison felt like she understood what her best friend had meant, as she watched Kira break the silence first, by stepping into the pool of blood. There was a visceral _squelch_ as her boot landed in the puddle, and the coagulated blood was thick and heavy as she tried to lift her foot to take another step. The lack of ripples from the impact of Kira’s steps made everything seem eerily silent and muffled, like the very air they were breathing was congealed, too. The sound was a sickening audio track that would later haunt Scott in large rooms with high ceilings, where the echoes persisted long after you stopped breathing.

But the blood wasn’t _all_ Stiles’. The instructions for the ritual had specified ‘offerings’ from a large variety of animals too, which the pack took upon themselves to source one way or another in time for the next waning moon. There was even some plant sap mixed in there, somewhere.

But some of it _was_ his.

Scott had been in Stiles’ life for long enough to know what Stiles’ blood smelt like, even before he turned into a werewolf. There was the time Stiles’ foot missed the curb as he got out of a car and skinned half of his calf on the asphalt. There was the time that Stiles wasn’t paying attention as he was making his lunch and cut the very tip of his ring finger off with the knife. No one at school could remember or tell after six months, but Stiles was still self-conscious about it. There was the time when he had tripped while running away and fell so hard he almost broke his nose, and had blood smeared on his shirt for the rest of the hour that they had to hide in the bushes. There were countless times that Scott saw his friend get hurt, and had seen the way the red readily flowed from the boy’s body. The smell came back to Scott easily now, in the enclosed space suffocated with all of these living people. It had always lurked like a predatory animal below the calm surface of his life, roaming close enough to shore to climb out during the night and seep into his pores, his skin, his hair. It crowded him in its stink so Scott could never forget where it came from.

Scott wasn’t the only one who recognised the smell, though. Although he was the first person to gag when his brain connected the dots, he felt rather than saw Derek tense beside him a second later. He lost track of people’s reactions then, because all he could see was the red of the ground and the red of Stiles’ body.

The smell had pored out of Stiles like he had been emptied of it – it was an impossible amount of blood for a boy made out of fragile bone and already pale skin. His face emerged untainted like alabaster bone from the sanguine sea that surrounded him, like he was simply floating on the surface of an ocean, calmly drifting away.

When the Nogitsune situation began to get out of hand with Stiles, the teenagers decided to turn to the one way they could help their friend without putting the rest of the town in danger. Kira knew that her mother possessed a special book that detailed Kitsune history, including their enemies and ancient methods of eradicating them. She knew because she found it hidden and locked away in their new house, having accidentally triggered the opening sequence with her Kitsune powers when she was honing her powers at home. Her mother obviously didn’t want Kira to find it, and although she wanted to ask her mother why, there had been no time left to waste. There was one chapter in the book that introduced a bloodletting ritual that the ancient Kitsune elders used to banish the Nogitsune from its vessel and into the unsustainable unknown. It was supposed to kill it.

It was supposed to kill something.

Kira carefully made her way through the blood, having realised that although the liquids had coalesced and began to solidify, it was still slippery. Scott could hear her sniffling even before she reached Stiles’ body. When she went to kneel, her boot squeaked and slid against the blood, and she fell bodily to the ground, finally sending ripples through the surface of the bloody lake. Isaac and Derek both growled out of instinct, and Scott smelt salt in the air, but none of them could move because of the acrid stench that suffused the air around the ritual space.

Kira took a shuddering breath as she managed to sit upright, half of her cameo print jacket soaked with a dark crimson, before she lifted one of Stiles’ bloodied hands, and felt for a pulse in the slick skin there. Her hand shook so hard that Scott could see the movement from the doorway.

There was silence as Kira waited for a heartbeat to repeat itself, for some sign of life to jump out at her and make Stiles open his eyes. The unsettling quietness stretched on for an impossible and desperate minute, and all Scott could think of was that this was what it sounded like for the dead. At some point, Scott, as well as everyone else, began to hear Kira’s whispered pleas of _please please please please_ under her breath.

When she gave up on Stiles’ wrist and moved to his neck instead, a vowel snapped in half in Scott’s throat.

Kira began to sob, even as she pressed her slender fingers to the bloodied skin of Stiles’ jugular.

“He’s …” It was all Derek could manage to get out, and the room seemed like it had been vacuumed of all sound, because Scott suddenly couldn’t hear anything besides the pounding of his own heartbeat and the silence from Kira. He desperately wanted anything to fill that void, only he didn’t know what he would do if he heard the word _dead_.

“Is he?” Derek demanded, and the vacuum was in Scott’s lungs, now, and neither Derek nor Scott could _breathe_. Finally, Kira’s hand slowly lowered from Stiles’ neck, and the wet and impossible splash of her hand hitting the thick puddle beside Stiles’ body sounded like a cathedral chime to Scott’s ears.  Like the toll of a church bell. Like a death toll.

Scott’s hand had been over his mouth and his nose to guard against the smell when he entered, as was Isaac's. Derek had been the only one who had stiffened his stance and bore the olfactory invasion, but his eyes had been hard and his voice was strained. However, even that hand couldn’t muffle the sound Scott made now when Kira finally sat back on her heels and began to cry openly.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying, as she wiped away at endless tears, streaking her own face red with the blood as she touched at the teardrops. Allison got down in the mess with her, staining her black stockings and clutching at Kira’s hands as she continued to wipe at her face.

“Don’t do this, don’t do this to yourself,” Allison was saying, as she tried to stop Kira from rubbing her face raw, before Allison squeezed her own eyes shut. “Maybe … Maybe there’s something we can do. We can bring him back, right?”

But Kira didn’t seem to hear her. “I’m so sorry, I thought it would work – this is – it’s all my fault.”

Scott realized then that he was crying then, too. It was bizarre, the tears seemed to come from nowhere, and although there was a dull ache somewhere in his heart and behind his eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything besides the numbness. He was barely registering what was happening in front of him, as his brain relentlessly rejected that this was reality. He wanted to get down in the mess of red and shake Stiles until he woke up, and threw his pillow at Scott, like they would as young children when they had sleepovers. Because Stiles looked just like he would when he was sleeping, or pretending to, and Scott really wanted to kick his ass one more time in Mario Kart before his mum got home from her shift and told them off for not sleeping enough and eating too much candy. For fucks sake, this wasn’t the time to sleep, and Scott could get down there, and shake him, and shake him until Stiles popped awake like he always did, and it would all be okay –

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t get any closer for the same reason that Derek was rooted to the spot like a marble statue.

Scott moved to the side instead, and he managed to get the tip of one sneaker into the pooling blood on the floor after a few steps. The blood seemed to be alive as the toe of his Converse breached the surface of the liquid, and more red rushed up the side as his sole touched the ground. It was as if the red wanted to conquer him too, and in that moment, Scott would have let it. But he was pushed back again, leaving a bloodied sneaker print on the concrete. He began to circle the space at a radius to Stiles, trying to find a way in to his friend, his brother. The realisation came to Scott that if Stiles really was dying, he was not going to do this alone. Stiles wouldn’t have left him alone.

Scott couldn’t fathom how weak he was in this moment, to be able to be deterred by something like a smell. He had obliterated a mountain ash barrier, he had become a true alpha, and yet he was barred from holding his best friend because the smell of Stiles’ blood made him feel as though he was drowning in it. The thought of being covered in Stiles’ blood caused a shudder to wrack through Scott’s body, and although Scott had the same determination to break free of this boundary around the ritual space as he did when he was trapped in the mountain ash circle, he was now at odds with the will of the wolf inside him. He was half shifted from the exertion of fighting against his inner wolf when his instincts flipped the fuse and regulated all control to his baser instincts, which just wanted to survive this night. The wolf had decided that this was an assault on more than enough sensory input levels for Scott and that the boy had to escape this nightmare, this place, if he wanted any chance of recovering from the knowledge that his best friend was dead.

So instead of advancing forwards, the wolf in Scott backed down, whining with its tail tucked between his legs, head shaking violently from side to side. It pulled Scott’s feet out from under him, and he ran out of the loft, throwing the front door open with inhumane strength. Scott only briefly registered the sound of metal being ripped from concrete before his wolf had carried him out of the building. He kept running until his bones creaked and the wolf in him was panting, and then he kept running, blindly into the dark. When the wolf finally collapsed from exhaustion four hours later, Scott slowed to a stop by the side of a garbage disposal plant in an unknown town. The moon was waning high in the sky, and when Scott looked up at it, he leant against the fence of the plant and vomited.

Dimly, he registered Lydia’s scream in the back of his mind.

The Sheriff didn’t understand the situation, and when Scott told him initially, he had scoffed and wondered how hard he was going to have to pretend-ground Stiles this time. But when Scott started to cry, the Sheriff’s old but healthy heart thudded painfully in his chest for the first real time in years. He retreated to his experience as the Sheriff then, asking Scott to recount exactly what happened in a thick voice. He had been too stunned to take out his usual pen and notepad, but he was glad that he did not have to revisit his son’s death again to file the paperwork. Scott would be reliving it for years, in his dreams and visions.

“I’m so sorry. I promised you that I would protect him, and I tried but I couldn’t.” Scott was trying to say, but the Sheriff couldn’t hear much past _I’m so sorry, Stiles is dead_. What he did understand was that Scott would never have done anything to genuinely and intentionally hurt Stiles, and Stiles would have never willingly hurt Scott. Sure, there was that time when he found Stiles hurling lacrosse balls at a taped up Scott in their backyard, and when Scott said it was for _science_ he had really meant _werewolf science_. But he always knew that Scott and Stiles would have died protecting each other … and now it finally happened.

“No.” The Sheriff had said then, interrupting Scott’s babbling, before he sat heavily in his Sheriff’s chair and his eyes widened with realization. “Oh my god.”

Scott could still smell it; the stench of it had somehow gotten stronger, and it was as if it had been carried and amplified by his trauma. It was in Scott’s mouth, its taste leaden and heavy, and it was in his hair, and his clothes, and it clouded his mind. He hated that he smelt like the death of his best friend.

But he hated it more when the Sheriff asked to see his son in a broken voice, and he had to answer –

“He’s at home. At your home. I didn’t – I didn’t want to bring him here. He belongs at home, with you … With his family. I’m sorry, I can –“

“No … no,” The Sheriff stopped him, and his eyes were blind with pain. “I can … I can go see him.” It came out as a question, and Scott’s heart broke in two as he saw the expression of defeat on Sheriff Stilinski’s face. All the Sheriff could think of was that he had failed his wife, and now he had failed his son, too.

_We’re supposed to take care of each other._

Scott followed the Sheriff out of the office and into the car park where Sheriff Stilinski fumbled slowly for his keys. It was like his fingers were numb, because when he did manage to grab them, he gripped them so tightly that his fingers and knuckles turned white, before he looked up with a shuddering breath at the sky. Scott waited patiently for the Sheriff to take ten long and measured breaths before he had to remind the Sheriff to unlock the car so they could get in.

Scott had ridden in the Police Cruiser many times in his youth and adolescence, both in the front and handcuffed in the back with Stiles. But never once did he look across the dashboard and notice the small photo the Sheriff had beside the police radio. It was on the side of the steering wheel, so perhaps the walkie-talkie had blocked Scott’s view before. But now he was older, and he could see over the device, and he saw that it was small and coloured, a little larger than a passport photo. It was a photo that showed a happy family, with a dad and a mum, and a small but dirty child crowded in between. It was the Stilinski family the day they had moved into Beacon Hills, and Scott realized that Stiles must have been dirty from climbing under the truck to retrieve his Pokemon cards, which had been scattered by the wind. Stiles had told Scott many times how attached he was to those cards, and about the terrible state of disrepair the moving van had been in, because it smeared grease _all over me and my Mew Two card when I had to climb back out, automobiles these days, Jesus._ It twisted Scott’s heart painfully when he thought about the Sheriff having to take the photo away after today. Or maybe he would keep it there – maybe he would be strong enough.

The blue jeep was waiting in the driveway when the Sheriff pulled up by the curb, and Scott would never not feel his stomach drop when he saw that shade of blue again. Perhaps the Sheriff still held some hope that all of this was a sick joke, or even a dream, because it was only when Derek emerged from the driver’s seat instead of Stiles that Scott saw the Sheriff legitimately break down for the first time in person. John Stilinski covered his mouth as he made aborted denials, and his body shook as the grief came in sharp twists when Derek opened the backseat door, and met the Sheriff’s eyes with the same agonized gaze that he had the night John Stilinski had found the Hale house burned to the ground.

Derek waited by the open jeep door as the Sheriff managed to grasp the police car door handle with a slippery hand, his eyes never leaving the car that held his boy, and made his way around the front of the police car. Scott slowly got out after him, but by the time Scott’s foot hit the sidewalk, the Sheriff was already at the door of the jeep and looking inside.

They had called Deaton, who helped Allison and Kira get Stiles into the bathtub in Derek’s loft and together they washed all the blood away from his body and clothes. Since the shirt and pants Stiles had been wearing had to be thrown away, Scott had to dress Stiles in some of his own clothes, because he couldn’t risk running into the Sheriff at Stiles’ house before he was ready. It made Scott’s blood run cold to feel Stiles’ skin cold and clammy to the touch, after the blood had been washed off and the stench was more bearable. Deaton had dried Stiles, but Scott had dressed him with Allison’s help, because Stiles was leaden and heavy, and Scott was afraid he would snap something with the way he could barely feel his fingers. But it didn’t matter anyway, because they shared clothes all the time, and they had always been the same size since they first met all those years ago. But the Sheriff didn’t know this, because Stiles’ clothed body was wrapped in a lavender sheet in the back of his jeep; it was the same bed sheet that Melissa would put out whenever Stiles slept over on the spare mattress, because Stiles kicked too much in his sleep to not dream that he was buried alive when he slept in a sleeping bag. It became known as Stiles’ own personal sheet, because Scott never got to use it anymore, but Stiles was around enough that Scott didn’t notice anyway. Scott had seen it in the cupboard when he was getting clothes last night, and he realized that he would never have to use it ever again. This colour would also make Scott sick to his stomach whenever he saw it painted on someone’s nails or dyed in someone’s hair.

But the worst thing was that the Sheriff couldn’t bear to be near the body, and it was haunting for Scott when he realized that John Stilinski could smell it too. It was like Scott was back in the loft all over again, and he wanted to touch and hold Stiles, but he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, I … Can you – I need, can … can you carry him inside for me?” The Sheriff asked in a broken voice, as he looked between Scott and Derek, and now he _couldn’t_ look at the body anymore, not at the lavender sheet that made John Stilinski think of a young Stiles who had come home from a sleepover at Scott’s house to proudly announce that he was a man now, because Melissa had given him his first _big boy sheet, Dad_ , _look at me, owning linen_.

“I’ll do it.” Derek said, and without hesitating he leant into the jeep and gently gathered the body into his arms, cradling it like he was holding a newborn or a baby bird.

“Thank you,” The Sheriff said quietly, and slowly turned to the house, gripping his keys again. “Thank you.” He repeated, almost to himself.

Derek had to deposit the body on the living room couch, while the Sheriff leant over the sink, trying not to cry but failing. Scott pretended not to hear the harsh words the Sheriff was whispering to himself, or the way he ground his teeth and gripped the edge of the sink so hard that Scott could hear his worn down joints pop. It was only when Scott smelt the whiskey did he intervene, and grip the bottle just hard enough that the Sheriff couldn’t tug it from his grip. The Sheriff’s gaze was red and raw, and Scott fought the urge to cry, also. There had been too much crying recently, it seemed all that anyone was capable of doing since it happened. His nose would smell only death and salt and it burnt him worse than anything he had ever experienced. Every breath felt like a lung full of embers, and he couldn’t rid himself of it no matter what he did.

Then the Sheriff sobbed brokenly, and the bottle slipped from his grasp as he collapsed to his knees and crumpled onto the kitchen tiles. The cry of anguish made Derek run out the door in the blink of an eye, as the Sheriff wailed for his dead son in his kitchen.

“Please, just … just leave me.” The Sheriff had managed when his lungs recognised some semblance of air again, and when Scott had tried to stay, the Sheriff had screamed at him until he left. Scott took the whiskey, though.

Derek could hear the man fall apart inside the house, as he sat on the same branch that he used to watch over Stiles on when the town was too supernatural for the humans in the pack. Neither Stiles nor Allison knew about it, but both he and Scott spent some nights looking after the both of them. Although Scott got to spend those nights in the comfort of Allison’s bed with her, they knew it was part of the alpha duty of protecting the pack.

But he watched as Scott left the house, too distracted to smell him or even notice that Derek didn’t go more than a few hundred meters before he turned back to keep watch over the house. Derek stayed through the night until he saw the sun come up and the Sheriff leave for work in the morning, and he held his breath the whole time in fear that he might miss the minute sounds of a razor sliding across aged skin, or the cap being eased off of a bottle of medication. Or worse, Derek was afraid of the unnecessary loading of the Sheriff’s gun, because there was no guarantee that Derek could move quickly enough to make any kind of difference in time.

Derek came back to the Stilinski house every time the Sheriff was at home for the rest of the month, and the smell still permeated everything.

The stink stayed, despite everything that the pack tried to rid themselves of it. It was like a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from, and they were trapped in the same dream together. No one had seen Lydia after the ritual, and when Allison tried to visit, Mrs Martin had turned her away because she said Lydia was unwell. When Allison snuck into Lydia’s room in the night, she found her catatonic and unresponsive to everything that she tried. She was hospitalised a week and a half later, three days before Stiles’ funeral. It was at a clinic out of town, and Kira caught wind at school that it was a high security asylum for the opulent.

With Lydia’s absence and apparent comatose state, Allison lost her effervescent cheerfulness too, and the pack descended further into the tailspin caused by Stiles’ death. Everything deteriorated slowly then, like a molar left to the mercy of a carbonated soft drink.

Kira moved away halfway through the semester. Mrs Yukimura found out the truth about the cause of Stiles’ death, and was so ashamed that her daughter stole from her, conducted the ritual without her consent or direction, and possibly endangered the lives of everyone in the pack and the town, that she put her foot down and moved the Yukimuras far away. What Kira did went against her principles of wielding Kitsune power, and this wasn’t how she raised Kira to be, despite the fact that Kira was only trying to help. Noshiko Yukimura also felt responsible for the boy’s death, because although Kira was an amateur, she had followed the instructions in the book perfectly. She just simply wasn’t experienced enough to account for how deeply rooted the Nogitsune was, and that killing the dark spirit would sacrifice the vessel also. Kira should have been taught the Kitsune ways when she had first discovered her powers, but Noshiko had been unprepared to thrust her daughter into the supernatural unknown so quickly; the less she knew, the better, Noshiko had thought. So she found Isaac afterschool, Scott after lacrosse practice, Allison after history class, Derek at his loft and she wrote to Lydia Martin using the address in the school referencing system, and apologised to each of them individually. Both for her daughter’s irresponsibility and well wishing but foolish actions, and her own naive ignorance to the supernatural developments in Beacon Hills. Kira’s move was so sudden and unexpected that it wasn’t until the announcement of a new History teacher at Beacon Hills High that the pack discovered Kira’s relocation. In the end, both Kira and Noshiko decided that she had done enough at Beacon Hills, and the only way to move on was to start again. Noshiko was too ashamed, and Kira had a guilt too heavy to not drown her in the bubbling pool of tears that awaited her under her feet. Kira’s goodbye letters had no return address, and she even mailed Lydia’s to the rehabilitation centre.

When Scott opened his letter, it took him a few moments to read the letter properly since words and sentences were interrupted with smudges, like the letter had been left to the mercy of a drizzle. Like it was just too far away from the hurricane of reality to erase all memory of what really happened. But he understood what Kira meant to say. _Don’t come and find me. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. Goodbye._ Scott stopped going to Stiles’ grave every day after dinner afterward.

Instead, he went to Sheriff Stilinski’s house every Wednesday, Thursday and weekend night when Scott didn’t have lacrosse and the Sheriff didn’t have extra shifts – now that he had one less mouth to feed in the Stilinski house – and brought tofu burgers and salads. No one at the station said anything about the Sheriff’s briefer appearances, or about the sunken and hollow way his face looked since his son’s funeral. The Sheriff stopped complaining after the fourth time Scott came by unannounced, because Melissa had came with him. They all understood what it meant to stop.

Five weeks after Stiles’ funeral, Allison admitted to Scott that she had been seeing things again, and Scott heard what she wasn’t saying. _Is there something wrong with me too?_

_I don’t want to hurt anyone._

_I’m scared._

When she told Scott that her ghost was Kate Argent, panic gripped Scott’s heart like a vice. But Deaton assured him that there was no way for Kate to come back from the dead, at least in the way that Allison had described. This was the ill-fated side effect of replacing their parents as sacrifices, and there was nothing that Deaton knew to do to alleviate the problem. Allison locked away her weapons after the night she woke up beside her father's bed, with a crossbow pointed at his sleeping head, having walked herself there in her dream, hunting Kate. Then she began to jump at every sound, and it became impossible to concentrate in class.

A Wendigo killed Isaac eleven weeks later, and Derek told Scott to stop thinking of _pack_ and to start thinking for himself. They collected the body, bought a grave plot for him, and buried him adjacent to Stiles, but there was no ceremony with a minister. Only the pack showed up to the funeral, except now, the pack had shrunk to Scott, Allison and Derek. Only Allison cried, but Scott felt dead inside, again.

“It shouldn’t be like this.” Allison had said, almost too quiet for anyone to catch, but Scott nodded as she grasped his hand tighter. “What are we meant to do?”

Scott wished he knew.

Allison began to take medication for the visions, things like sedatives and lithium, and it killed Scott to watch her down a cocktail of pills every day. But while she lost her sharpness and joyfulness, she could finally sleep at night and didn’t jump at every little thing. Chris Argent told the school that Allison was diagnosed with a minor branch of bipolar disorder so she could take her medication at school, too. The side effects of the pills made Allison throw up and drowsy, but she admitted to Scott that she would much rather numb herself than hurt the people she loved because of the visions of Kate.

On the one-year anniversary of Stiles’ death, Derek disappeared. Scott didn’t know what happened, and had even less of a clue as to whether he died or was just missing, but Derek left no trace. Their contact had lessened in frequency after Isaac’s funeral, where Derek more or less ‘disbanded’ the pack, but Scott met up with Derek from time to time at other places like parks and the McCall house to talk to him about supernatural and un-supernatural murders in the town, or to bring baked goods and to check that Derek was still eating regularly. Scott’s world had suddenly narrowed down to his mother, Sheriff Stilinski, Allison and Derek so quickly that it made Scott’s head spin, and he was determined to not lose anyone anymore if he could still help it. It didn’t matter if Derek was more stoic than before, and barely responded to most of what Scott said; Scott could talk enough for the both of them. That’s what Stiles would have done, anyway.The fact that Derek didn't screen Scott's calls and refuse to show up was a good sign too, at least. So when Scott went to Derek’s house to investigate – the same loft that he had avoided since the ritual – he became paralysed in the elevator when he realized that the building still stunk like the same torturous reminder of their failure, and of the absence left by his best friend. The bile came back with a vengeance at the memory of it all.

Scott wondered what compelled Derek to stay in the same place that Stiles died in. Even now he could smell the residue of the ritual like it had happened yesterday, the cocktail of blood that had seeped into the pores of the concrete, that stained the floor just enough that Scott can see it with his werewolf eyes. Perhaps Derek was punishing himself – with his inherited senses, keener than Scott’s own, the decaying smell must seem to permeate everything. 

Everything in the loft remained undisturbed and everything had been left behind. Derek’s phone, his wallet, even the electricity and water were still running. The Camaro sat in the external driveway of the loft, collecting dead leaves and bird shit on its bonnet from the overhanging trees. The evidence of it overstaying its welcome in its usual stationary position and the fact that Scott couldn’t find any helpful tracks in the areas surrounding the loft meant that he had no leads to find Derek. It severed Scott in half to all of a sudden lose Derek too, when he had already lost so many people with no time to say goodbye in his life. Derek had been pack, and as abstract as that bond was, they had grown to understand and respect each other. Despite the fact that Scott was thrust on him with no warning, Derek had looked after him, even when Scott took over as the alpha of the pack, and was inexperienced enough to have driven it into the ground if Derek were never there to intervene. Scott buried the idea that Derek abandoned them, and called Allison.

Scott snapped his lacrosse stick into pieces during the practice afterwards, but not even Coach made an effort to question him. Finstock gave Scott a weary glare and a wide berth, and everyone on the field began to avoid him during play. Scott snapped Greenberg’s stick too, before practice finished.

Scott’s blood pumped through him like a torrent he couldn’t stop.

Allison’s condition began improving, and she lessened the intake of pills. Although she still took six in the morning, four at lunch and five before bed, she could remove lithium from her prescription. Her joy began returning, although in increments, and now it was more lethargic and docile – Scott was just grateful to see her smile again.

He regretted throwing away his inhaler when he first became a werewolf when Melissa called him on graduation night as he was driving home from some anonymous senior’s party.

“It’s John. He’s been shot.”

Time turned immobile as Scott leapt out of the car, inner wolf again whining and desperate and taking over, as he ran across the street and in the direction of the hospital. He had hit the woods by the time he shifted, but Melissa heard his howl minutes before his arrival and knew exactly what it meant.

“I’m sorry Scott, please look at me, you can’t go in there, Scott!” Melissa was yelling at him as she spotted him from the entrance to the hospital. He had just burst through the bushes, and she began to run toward him to stop his forward momentum. She didn’t flinch at his half shifted form, but seeing his mother – her human face worried with lines, her human gait slower and more awkward – it made Scott realize just how much he was losing control these days. The wolf within him was becoming more unpredictable and volatile, and he thought about Allison, and Stiles, and Deaton’s words about how their sacrifices would lead to irreversible consequences. He tried to still his breathing, and made an effort to change back. He couldn’t lose control, not now.

“Sweetie, please stop, you can’t be in that building.” She said as she finally reached him, and although Scott could have easily manoeuvred past her by now, he let her wrap him up in her arms and bury his face in her hair.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered, and Scott clutched at her back as he fought back tears and nausea.

“You – you smell like it.” He grimaced, and Melissa nodded sadly. Her eyes were red and swelling, and as he met her gaze, tears began to well up again.

“I know, I’m sorry. I tried to change out of my scrubs so you wouldn’t be able to tell, but …” Scott’s eyes darted back to the hospital, and now he could trace the scent too – the scent of Stilinski blood, that had been so pervasive in his life this past year. It was richer now, and darker, with age. Although it was physically impossible, Scott could swear that he could tell which room the operation was in, because one of the windows of the hospital appeared to be tinted a deep red. Melissa couldn’t see what he saw, though.

Scott was furious with it all, with how helpless he felt and how he couldn’t seem to change anything no matter how he tried. He hated that he still smelt it everywhere he went, except now it smelt like an omen. He continued to keep watch over Allison at night, although now she didn’t know about it. The pills made her lifeless in her sleep, and to lie held in the embrace of a lifeless and prone body only made Scott feel like he was covered in blood, and it made him to want to claw out of his skin.

Sheriff Stilinski’s funeral was organised by Scott and Melissa, and funded by the Beacon Hills Police Department. The funeral was held four weeks later, and on the day Jordan Parrish told Scott that although the Sheriff had been mere weeks away from his scheduled retirement, the Beacon Hills Police Department were incredibly grateful for all that he had done to protect to the community and uphold the law. It came as a shock to Scott that the Sheriff had never mentioned his upcoming retirement to him, but then again, John Stilinski had stopped talking much after his son died, and he and the McCalls mostly ate dinner in silence, except for Scott’s efforts to fill the quiet – that dreaded quiet – with something, anything.

"There's something I have for you, actually. It was from Sheriff Stilinski's car." Parrish reached into his pocket and retrieved his wallet. He pulled out a small photograph carefully tucked into a pocket inside the wallet, and handed it to Scott. It had been a little more weathered than since the last time he saw it, and the photo was slightly faded from sitting in the sun for days on end, but Scott knew the three faces smiling joyfully at him from within the small, coloured photo. "I thought you might like to have it, seeing as how you're his last next of kin." 

Scott was too distracted to correct Parrish about his relationship to John Stilinski, although he never would, from that point on. He gazed down at the photo as his eyes grew hot and his chest grew warm, because _John Stilinski was strong enough._  Parrish cleared his throat when Scott didn't say anything, and told him that being the Deputy, Parrish was going to become new Sheriff, and Scott was welcome to contact him if there were any problems. Scott opened his mouth to thank him out of habit when an unfamiliar ring tone started in the air.

“I’m sorry, it’s the station.” Parrish had said apologetically, and went to fish for his phone in his pocket. “Everyone in the Department is here for Sheriff Stilinski, so I’m handling all emergency calls that come in through our receptionist.” 

“No, it’s fine. I have to find my mum anyway.” Scott had tried to smile, but judging by the look on Parrish’s face, it might have come out as a rictus instead. Scott allowed the Deputy to move off under the cover of a tree and away from the funereal crowd, and although he didn’t think anything of it when his werewolf senses overheard that the call was about a bad traffic collision about a block away, his blood chilled when he heard the description for the vehicles involved.

He prayed that he was wrong, that there were more people in the town that owned black Mazdas than just the Argents.

It was a four-car pile up, and although there were three people injured, there were also three dead.  Scott arrived just after the ambulance, and he found Chris Argent unconscious and bleeding from a large gaping wound in his lower abdomen, but alive. He had to be taken away immediately by the waiting ambulance car, but several medics stayed behind to take care of the two other survivors, who had sustained less serious injuries. One of them was a woman with dark brown hair, while the other man was unconscious, also, but as she turned to look around, Scott saw that both of them were strangers. All that was left at the scene for Scott were the burning metal carcasses of the four cars grotesquely wrapped around each other, blackened from the engine fire and gasoline.

“What happened?” Scott asked, and when there came no answer, he turned to the conscious survivor and shoved the medic out of the way. “I said **_what happened!?_** ”

The woman shrieked and pried at his hand, which was wrapped around her torn and bloodied scarf, lifting her off the tarp that she had been deposited on. She swallowed with difficulty, and there was blood still coming out of her nose, liquid and hot and Scott could not stop smelling _that smell_ again.

“It wasn’t – it was the black car. It was a red light, I, we were going the right way, they were supposed to stop, it just – it just ploughed right through, all three of us lined up somehow, I’m sorry, it wasn’t my fault I swear! Please don’t hurt me!” She was crying and hysterical, and suddenly there was a ripping sound and she was falling backward onto the ground. Scott looked down and saw that he was holding a piece of her scarf in his hands, his claws having torn through the thinly woven fabric. He realized that his teeth were sharpened to points and cutting into his bottom lip, and that if he really thought about it, he knew that his eyes were burning a red as intense as the fire of the wreckage.

“Hey! Step away from the woman!” The medic had recovered and was advancing back even before the woman had fallen. “What do you think you’re doing?” He placed a hand on Scott’s shoulder to turn him, but it was like trying to turn a stone statue. Then, when the woman fell, he rushed around Scott to make sure she was okay, despite the fact that it was a light fall. When the medic looked up next, the boy was already gone.

Chris Argent had sustained severe injuries that were far more extensive than Scott’s first impression had suggested. He was kept in intensive care for more than a month, and then was released into the regular wings for the remainder of his physical therapy period. The doctors were confident that it wouldn’t take him long to recover and be able to walk independently again, as his spine wasn’t injured, but he seemed reluctant to respond to treatment. In reality, Chris Argent would rather stay at the hospital indefinitely than return to the house where his dead daughter’s clothes were still in her wardrobe, where her toiletries were still in their shared bathroom, where her books were still scattered on the kitchen bench top, and where her medication was in the first aid kit under the sink, just in case. He would have preferred it that he died here.

Scott was the first visitor Chris received when he was granted visiting privileges. They both sat in silence for the first minute, where Scott stared at Chris, wrapped up in bandages, and Chris stared at Scott, who appeared to be almost transparent in the early morning light that filtered through the hospital curtains. Then Scott cleared his throat, and asked Chris if he was okay.

Chris’s attempt at laughter was pained and it made him cough violently in the aftermath, but he managed to look at Scott as he put a hand against his dislocated rib. “Are you?”

“What happened?” Scott asked, in lieu of an answer. Chris paused and frowned, as if he didn’t want to desecrate Allison’s memory by leaving out any details in his reply.

“Allison had been driving.” He began, and although Scott knew that Allison had stopped taking the medication a while ago, making it safe for her to drive, it still made his breath come in short when he heard about Allison driving again. “I … I shouldn’t have let her drive, I know. She insisted. She said … she said that she didn’t want to live the rest of her life scared of what might happen, because she’s already done enough of that in the past year and a half. She said, there’s no such thing as fate, but there’s also no such thing as werewolves, and if fate decided that today was her last day, she wasn’t going to hide from it … It was as if she knew.”

He took a deep breath, and Scott saw the pain on his face as the man stared at the foot of his bed, his face suddenly older and more lined than Scott had remembered. His hair was greying in areas and the beard that had emerged during Chris’s stay at the hospital was also littered with sparse white hairs. When he continued, his voice was low and haunted.

“We were driving to the funeral. I told her there was no rush, because you would understand if she was late, because she had over slept in the morning. I just … I just wanted her to get a good night’s sleep. I didn’t want to wake her before she was ready.” Chris paused here, and placed a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry,” He said, and it was the first time that Scott heard these words and didn’t want to break through the nearest wall. “I shouldn’t have let her drive.”

Scott didn’t say anything, but he didn’t think he could get anything out anyway, what with his heart shoved inside his throat and his tongue a heavy piece of meat in his mouth. He waited for Chris to regain his composure, but when Chris looked at him, Scott looked away, suddenly unable to meet the gaze of the man.

“She … We were driving at a normal speed, actually, and there weren’t many cars on the road. The light turned red even before we turned the corner into the street, and Allison had started to slow the car, so I didn’t think anything of it. But,” – and here, the confusion was genuine in his face – “suddenly she looked in the rear-view mirror, and it was like an electric current went through her, and I had never seen her so scared before. It was like she saw something, like a ghost, and then she grabbed her own throat, and the car was speeding up suddenly. It was … it all happened so fast, then.”

As Scott tried to process all of this, wondering if Allison had been attacked by a new supernatural threat, or if Stiles was right, and he really was cursed, something grim struck him.

“What? What is it?” Chris asked, when he saw the sudden change of expression on Scott’s face.

Scott met Chris’s questioning gaze, and answered him slowly. “There was never any guarantee that the pills could drive Kate away. They were just suppressants.”

It took a moment, but Chris’s expression suddenly broke down, like an old dam overwhelmed by a river reinforced by the raindrops of a thunderstorm. He began to wheeze as his brain started to accept the new reality of what happened. “Oh god,” he whispered, and covered his mouth before he squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh god, Allie.”

In the end, Chris Argent did leave the hospital, but he stayed at a motel while the Argent house went up for sale. He organised Allison’s funeral in Beacon Hills, and Scott knew it was out of respect for him, because the second the funeral was over, and they said their goodbyes, Chris Argent drove the moving truck out of town. There were no available grave plots near Stiles and Isaac in the graveyard, but the place that Chris found was on the way for Scott to pass by when he went in to visit, so it worked out, he supposed. Scott wrote Allison a eulogy that he didn’t read to anyone, and he took it, along with a bottle of tequila and a satchel of wolfsbane that he stole from Deaton’s lab to her grave one night. The moon was waning, and he read it to her in the stillness of death in the graveyard, before he burnt it into ashes. He wasn’t Stiles, so it was a gamble when he put the wolfsbane in the drink. He didn’t know how large a dose was lethal, but Stiles had joked about getting everyone in the pack secretly drunk with wolfsbane one time, just to see if he could draw on Derek’s face when he passed out, so he knew it would have an effect, at least. He drank the entire bottle, and in the morning when Melissa found him missing, she called the Beacon Hills Sheriff. Sheriff Parrish discovered Scott in the graveyard, presumably drunk and unconscious, and loaded him into the backseat of the police cruiser, careful not to wake him up. He delivered him to the McCall house, where Melissa was waiting, having skipped her shift for the day. When Scott woke up with a pain in his head and black on his teeth later that night, Scott told Melissa that he just wanted to stop feeling for a little while.

A while after the beginning of summer, Melissa told Scott that she had been offered a specialist medical job a few states over, and that she was going to take it because the pay and hours were better, and they would have a company car. She said she knew that Scott was a mature adult now, and she trusted him to stay here in Beacon Hills to study veterinary work with Deaton if that was what he wanted to do. She had almost said _I know all of your friends are here_ before reality caught up with her and she snapped her mouth shut. 

It had been almost two years, but the wounds were still fresh. To this day, Melissa McCall could still recall the moment her heart broke for her baby boy, for whom she had sacrificed everything to raise and to protect and look after. He had been such a broken man, then, when she had asked, “Do you want to stay here, Scott?”

His voice was heavy when he responded; “All that’s left for me here is a graveyard, mum.”

So the McCalls moved away, far away, from the town that Scott grew up in, found his soul mate in, lost his best friend in, turned supernatural in, became a man in, and they left everything behind. But the one thing Scott could never escape was the iron tang that branded the insides of his noses and lungs.

The smell _never_ left him.

One night, when the full moon waxed highest in the sky, Lydia Martin woke up in the cafeteria of the rehabilitation centre. Since she had started responding to treatment, she had only been here a hand full of times to eat with her own hands and cutlery. It wasn’t so much the shock therapy that was getting her grey matter moving again, it was more due to her having much more time in isolation to understand her powers and prevent them from draining her empty. She never received any visitors apart from her parents, but there had been two pieces of mail in holding when she woke up for the first time. The doctor told her that she fell into a coma for four months after she read the first letter, although she couldn't remember what it was about. Her parents had ordered that the letters be burnt so that they couldn't traumatise their daughter again. When Lydia demanded to know what they were about, all her parents would tell her was that they were both from the Yukimura family.

But now the cafeteria was eerily quiet, like there was a lush carpet on the ground that stilled the air and silenced Lydia’s heartbeat. She had gone to bed like they were all told every night, but she had woken up here, on the hard and cold linoleum floor. There was a dull ache in her fingers and her eyes, though, like she had been up too late looking at a computer screen or a book, researching a supernatural phenomenon. It was a familiar feeling, although those experiences had happened so long ago that the nostalgia came in fuzzy and distorted, like the static on a television screen.

When she looked down, she was kneeling in a puddle of blood, thick with the passing of time, and soaking the knees of her hospital grade nightgown. The blood was drying and tacking as she tried to get up, but then the moon emerged from behind the cloud. As the moonbeams lit the interior of her prison, the banshee screamed as she saw the face of the dead boy who had loved her, for the last time. 

**Author's Note:**

> There are extensive mentions of blood, like its smell, its sound and texture, throughout some of story. It's mostly heavy in the beginning.  
> There's the possibility of suicide mentioned but it isn't carried out.  
> There's self-medication and it's kind of to a pretty heavy degree, and brief descriptions of its side effects.
> 
> That's all I can think of that people might find triggering, but please leave a comment if you think something else should be added here! 
> 
> Reviews and kudos are so helpful thank you


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